Brewing in Beats: Plugin support for Filebeat prospectors

Welcome to Brewing in Beats! With this weekly series, we're keeping you up to date with what's new in Beats, including the latest commits and releases.

Last week, we released the second beta release of the Elastic Stack 6.0. Read more details in the blog post about what’s new in the Beats 6.0.0-beta2 release.

Filebeat: Prospectors now have a plugin interface

The Filebeat prospectors are responsible for the actual data collection. The most used one is log, which can tail rotating files, but we also have stdin, udp, redis slowlogs, and we plan more. This refactoring PR makes the prospectors be pluggable internally, just like the libbeat outputs, processors, Metricbeat modules, a.s.o. This means that it is now easier to create a Beat that uses “Filebeat as a library” and that adds it’s custom prospector.

This change is currently present only in the master branch.

Metricbeat: use less memory in the Windows perfmon module

The Windows perfmon module was allocating more memory than it’s needed to receive the performance counters. The memory wasn’t leaked, but just remained unused until it’s cleaned up by GC later.